<nettime> Regulation on Postcolonial Studies

[Martin Hardie <auskadi@tvcabo.co.mz>]

Obviously the proposed regulation (details posted last week by Eduardo Navas) 
is part of a larger picture, in relation to the education sphere in the US 
recall the committeee of which Mrs Cheney forms a part concerning  
un-American academics, but it also reachers wider and further than that. 

I thought this Fisk article was of interest as it describes a wider circle of 
activities invloved in this tendency and it also shows that such tendencies 
in thre age of Empire are not confined to the US. As with many things we talk 
about here they are not purely US issues but gobal issues that take their own 
peculiar form throughout the globe (in this case as the Aussies will 
recognise Griener-peculiar). 

we should also take note of the way the late Edward Said is portayed as some 
sort of intellectual terrorist jamming "America's intellectual radar" 
...maybe thus allowing the gound to be laid for other darstardly (?) deads.

Anyway here is the start of the Fisk article and the link to the rest below 
it:

-- November 4, 2003

When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Smearing Said and Hanan Ashrawi
By ROBERT FISK

Is "Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab" the dirty word? Let's 
start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate 
Palestinian-American academic who wrote--among many other books--Orientalism, 
the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies 
about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets 
sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: "As an 
Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be 
surprised if he's honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates."


According to Chafets, who (says the Post) spent 33 years "in politics, 
government and journalism" in Jerusalem, Orientalism "rests on a simple 
thesis: Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the 
Arab world." Said "didn't blow up the Marines in Lebanon in 1983 ... he 
certainly didn't fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. What he did was to 
jam America's intellectual radar."

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk11042003.html
                   
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http://openflows.org/~auskadi/


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